Time & Perspective Quote by William Edward Hickson

“Glory” is the bait word here, and Hickson knows it. He isn’t selling grit as a private virtue; he’s reframing failure as a public kind of honor. In a 19th-century culture that prized moral improvement and “character” as social currency, the line turns falling - a source of shame, even stigma - into raw material for dignity. The trick is the sentence’s quiet demotion of perfection. “Never falling” sounds like the ideal, but Hickson treats it as sterile: a life so cautious, so managed, it never earns a story. Glory requires narrative, and narrative requires rupture.

The subtext is almost anti-heroic. The heroic image isn’t the flawless victor; it’s the person who gets up again and again, not once in a cinematic comeback but repeatedly, without the guarantee of applause. That repetition (“every time”) matters. It implies a life structured by setbacks, and it refuses the comforting fantasy that resilience is a single turning point. Hickson makes persistence the real achievement because it’s the one virtue available to people who can’t control the conditions they’re falling in - illness, poverty, war, social constraint.

The line also smuggles in a moral argument: if rising is the measure, then judging people by their stumbles is intellectually lazy. It’s a cultural corrective, aimed at a society too eager to equate misfortune with failure. Hickson offers a tougher consolation: you don’t get to avoid the fall, but you can still earn “glory” where it counts.